Sistema de categorías descriptivo-funcional para la conducta verbal en psicoterapia

Psychological interventions have shown effectiveness for the treatment of different psychological problems. Now, we need to know what processes make these results possible. The observational analysis of the verbal interaction between therapist and client has been used to analyze the learning processes that underlie the client’s behavioral change. To our knowledge, there is no coding system for therapeutic interaction based on functional descriptions that would allow a common understanding across different behavior therapies. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to develop such functional description-based coding system for clinical psychologists’ verbal behavior in clinical settings. Also, we have analyzed 66 clinical sessions belonging to 23 different cases using this coding system, the results have been compared with previous studies. The main result of this study is a system consisting of 5 functional categories with good reliability indices and methodological properties. The discriminant and cluster analysis have yielded similar results to those of previous studies. Finally, we discuss about conceptual and methodological advances of this functional-based coding system, we list the main limitations, and we propose further studies in this line of research.